Reading Critically

Before you even begin to read a piece, you get hints and clues to it's contents. A title can tell you a lot about a piece, and so can knowing information about the author, and where and when it was published. The first time you read a piece, just read it. Don't begin to analyze it yet, or pick apart all its particulars, just read it. Get used to the author's voice, recognize the subject and be able to point out the author's opinions. After rading, summarizing a work will help you understand it, ezpecially with more difficult pieces. Then, you begin the process of critical thinking, which consists of analyzing, inferencing, synthesizing and evaluating. In analyzing something, you should look at the author's main idea, support for the idea, special writing strategies and other elements. By inferencing, you "draw conclusions on a work based on your store of informmation and experience. In your synthesis, you link the elements you pointed out in the analysis, to a whole, bringing the big ideas together. And finally, you can evaluate, or judge the quality of the work. And voila, there you have it, a critical reading.